The sad with the funny.......

.....the good with the bad.....the balance of life.....F**K why does it have to be soooooooo damn hard?????

A bit of hilarity in amongst the chaos..........

I was at my sister's this weekend going through endless boxes of our Dad's various boxes....our Dad kept every little thing imaginable....really quite incredible!! I worry sometimes that I am a pack-rat but really my storage spaces are pristine compared to what some of his were. We lost track of how many boxes there were that looked like, on moving day, someone had opened up the desk drawers and dumped the contents into a box, sealed em up and sent em on their way......just like that....only to be kept sealed just as they were some 20-40 years later!! We moved a great deal all while growing up so there were alot of these kinds of boxes......not to mention the boxes filled with expired credit cards, matchbooks, batteries, pens & pencils, restaurant menus, coupons, random receipts, RSVP'd party invitations from people nobody knows today.......did you know that back then it was customary to put your RSVP's in writing???

This is about the 4th or 5th time that my sister and I have gotten together to sort through Dad's stuff.....our Dad suffers from Dementia and has recently been moved to a nursing home from his retirement home. He had to be moved as he was getting to be too much for the retirement home to handle....he no longer has the gift of speech which was probably one of his greatest gifts....a large part of his life was devoted to public speaking of various types, debating, wheeling and dealing and generally high powered social interactions.....so to see him how he is now is almost more than I can bear.....but I have to constantly remind myself that if it is almost more than I can bear....I can only imagine what it must be like for him.....THAT thought is enough to reduce me almost instantly to a puddle of tears.

Oh dear....bit of a tangent there.....anyway....in amongst some of his stuff......because of course you want to go through it all JUST in case there is something sentimental that might be a keeper (more on that for another post)......was this.......



It looked so official we had to really read all of it to figure out it was a joke!! Check out who signed the thing.....ROFLMAO!!!! It provided us some much needed bittersweet relief for the onerous task we were involved in at the time....for you see our Dad was also a lover of a well-timed good joke and he had a wonderful sense of humour.....nothing ever seemed to get him down a whole lot....in many ways he was a pretty laid back fellow with an eternal optimist kind of attitude towards life!!!

One of his favourites were always limericks........and he had a TON of them just waiting to be told. My favourite part was always....once we got older....he would tell us some of the more "racier" or inappropriate limericks...but when it came to the inappropriate word he would just mumble it...but of course it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what the word was!!! Then we would all bust up laughing and he would have a mischievous twinkle in his eye while my mother would usually be rolling her eyes heavenward....wondering what on earth she had done to deserve this crazy lot!!!